Metro News & Reviews

Go Metro to LA Pride!

This year’s edition of the enormously popular LA Pride Festival in West Hollywood begins Friday and runs through Sunday. By enormous we mean attended by hundreds of thousands of people, guaranteed.

The Festival part of the event is held in West Hollywood Park while the annual parade will be held on Santa Monica Boulevard on Sunday, beginning at Crescent Heights Boulevard and running west to Robertson Boulevard. A Metro bus all decked out in colors and such will be participating in the parade!

Let’s face it. This is WeHo we’re talking about, people. On a good day, traffic and parking can be challenging and it’s even more so during LA Pride.

There is no Metro Rail to WeHo (maybe one day, right?) but there are still some options for those who want to take transit to LA Pride with some busy and frequent Metro Bus Lines that roll through the area. The city of West Hollywood is also operating a free trolley on Santa Monica Boulevard with the route shown on the map above.

For those who wish to Go Metro to the LA Pride Festival, a few suggestions:

•On Friday and Saturday, the trolley intersects with several north-south Metro Bus lines. These include:

•There are other buses that travel near LA Pride but there are changes to their regular routes due to the festival. Click here to see Friday and Saturday detours for the 10, 30/330 and westbound 705. Click here to see Sunday detours for the 10, 30, 105 and 218.

•The 10, 105, 30/330 run all night. Please keep in mind that buses run much more infrequently during the late night and early morning!!!! Click on the links above to see timetables, routes and to ensure the bus you need is running when you need it!

In spirit of keeping it simple, some more advice on getting to LA Pride:

•If you’re coming from the Red Line subway, exit the train at Vermont/Santa Monica and switch to the westbound Metro 4 Local or 704 Rapid Bus that run on Santa Monica Boulevard. For the festival, exit the bus at Santa Monica Boulevard and San Vicente Boulevard and walk south to West Hollywood Park.

•If you’re coming from Santa Monica or the Westside, take the eastbound 4 Local or 704 Rapid Bus to the stop at San Vicente Boulevard, exit the bus and walk south to West Hollywood Park.

•As we mentioned above, the parade on Sunday closes down a big section of Santa Monica Boulevard. On Sunday, westbound 4 and 704 buses will travel to Santa Monica and Fairfax — just four blocks from the beginning of the parade for those who don’t mind walking. Eastbound 4 and 704 buses will leave Santa Monica Boulevard at Beverly. If you exit the bus there, it’s a .8-mile walk to the end of the parade route at Santa Monica Boulevard and Robertson Boulevard. See this map:

Wait. You’ve never ridden Metro before? No worries and no shame in that.

It’s pretty simple. The basics:

•Regular fares are $1.75. The easiest way to pay is to purchase a TAP fare card for $1 at TAP vending machines, which are located in all Metro Rail and Orange Line stations. We recommend loading the card with “stored value” — our fancy way of saying cash from which fares are deducted. If you pay with a TAP card, you get two hours of free transfers. Just TAP your card on the fare validator every time you board a bus or train.

•You can also pay cash to ride Metro buses. A regular one-way fare is $1.75, but you don’t get the two hours of free transfers. Exact change only please.

•If you’re riding a lot in any given day, a day pass costs $7 and is good for unlimited number of rides. You can load a day pass on a TAP card at any TAP vending machine or by asking the Metro bus operator when boarding a bus.

•Need help figuring out the screen prompts on the TAP vending machines? Try this page, which includes directions for the machines with the old prompts along with the few machines that have received the new screen prompts.

And, finally, if your head is spinning from all that bus talk, relax. Here’s Jennifer Hudson bringing it at last year’s festival:

Last year I watched my 704 skip throngs and throngs of people trying to ride, it was so full!
This festival is huge and happens every year, but unlike music festivals and other special events, Metro doesn’t add a lick of capacity or late night service. It feels like some folks in the planning department at Metro think that LGBT people and their allies can mostly be found in or near the tiny city of West Hollywood. We live all over Metro’s service area and use each of the bus lines listed above. By choosing to keep service low when we’re all out at night, our community is not being served.

And as an aside, discrimination remains a very real issue with Metro.

On my way back from Pride last year, there was a throng of revelers leaving Pride and waiting for the 30 bus to Atlantic Station. The bus was there, with the doors closed, but not yet scheduled to leave. I spoke briefly with the driver, who indicated that the bus stop was temporarily down the street. We checked the location, but there was no signage in that area. The driver turned on the bus, kept the doors shut, and left, while the throng of metro customers waived frantically for attention. A few friends and I sprinted to La Cienega & San Vicente and reached the bus stop before the driver arrived. When I boarded, I watched her expression of shock and disappointment as she recognized me.

Thanks for the note about this and I’m sorry you didn’t hear back from Metro regarding your complaint. Generally speaking, bus operators are told for safety reasons not to pick up passengers outside of bus stops.

In my time here (five-plus years), I don’t recall too many instances of Metro adding bus service for big events, although rail service is sometimes added for events. I do think that’s a legitimate public policy issue, especially for communities such as WeHo which are not part of the rail system. On your end, I encourage you to speak to your elected representatives about this and I’ll pass along your comment and concern to the folks at my end.

I can’t make any promises and sometimes there are issues that I’m unaware of. But I’ll pass along your comment.

Hello Steve and thank you for your quick reply. You are correct, I am equating metro bus service and metro rail service. To reiterate, everyone was at the bus stop, and there was no signage that would have re-enforced the driver’s claims that the bus was stopping on a side street instead of the crowded bus stop.

Basic respect and dignity dictate that if there’s an empty bus waiting in front of a crowd of people who believe they are in queue, then a driver should adapt accordingly. Frankly, I’d be stupefied if your office could come up with a safety or operational justification that outweighs the needs of about thirty-five customers waiting in the wee hours of Monday morning! I’d imagine some of those folks had to make another connection before their eventual return and freshen up before heading right back out to work.

As for my Representative, Huizar, he has sent his regrets to Pride for a few successive years. This year his office says that he had no idea when Pride would be happening and was only told three days in advance. Instead his constituent event for Pride weekend is “Movie Night” at the Hermon Dog Park. A sea of LGBT constituents ranks below hanging out with a few dog owners in the park!

If there’s one message that I could impress on Metro, it’s that “we are everywhere!” Some of us, like myself, are live in districts represented by people who would rather not be associated with their LGBT constituents. We need you to see beyond this and look out for our interests anyway.

Totally understand your frustration. I passed along your earlier comment. One extra thought: situations such as this hopefully serves as one more motivation for everyone to pay attention to emerging transit plans for our area, especially if Metro ends up pursuing a long-range plan update and ballot measure in 2016. If so, there will be a list of projects for everyone to review and decide if those projects meet their commuting needs.

In the meantime, hope you have a great Pride weekend and a lot of fun at the event!

If the 704 is too crowded and you can’t get on and buses keep passing by you, why not find people at the event to share an Uber or Lyft ride to the nearest Metro Rail station or a different bus stop, and split the cost?

Example:

1. Ugh, the bus keeps passing us by. Grr… This is why I hate public transit. Metro sucks.

2. Hey, all three of us seems to be catching the same bus and heading in the same direction. Why don’t we just hail Uber or Lyft and go to another bus stop / Metro Rail line?

3. Great idea! Let me check on whatsthefare.com on how much it’ll cost to get us from West Hollywood Park to Santa Monica / Vermont Metro Rail Station. Oh, it says both Uber and Lyft costs $13. Split that between 3 of us, it’s only $4.34 per person. You guys want to wait for the Metro Bus or you guys want to just split Uber and Lyft instead?

Who is your audience for this stuff? You are frequently on this blog, redirecting conversations towards your pet issues.

Most people here have heard about Libertarianism, and rejected it. Libertarian candidates lose elections every cycle to candidates from other parties. The Libertarian Party kept count of their elected officials on their website (52 partisan officeholders nationwide). Their support is so anemic, the website hasn’t been updated since 2012. .

How many times do you need to be rejected before it sinks in that people don’t want what you’re selling?